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When I was a budding young cook, my friends and I all cultivated stockpots – a big pot lurking at the back of our cookers, into which we chucked chicken bones, surplus veggies, the unusable dark green tops of leeks, potato peel, an onion … whatever. From time to time, these ingredients were brewed up into a dark odoriferous liquid, which we thought of as stock to add value to soups, casseroles, stews and sauces.

We cultivated our stockpots with fervour – like good, thrifty French housewives – because Elizabeth David said we should, and Elizabeth David was the new bright star among cookery writers whom we all followed faithfully.

My stockpot phase didn't last very long, though, because – although I loved to cook and gave plenty of ambitious dinner parties – the tiny cooker in my handkerchief-size kitchen really didn't have room for a large, resident pot. So, like most of my contemporaries, I went back to binning all of those chicken bones and vegetable scraps.

Now, years later, I find myself studying the scraps with new eyes. This time around, it is no longer their possible culinary value that strikes me; it's the thought of all those wonderful vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and other good stuff simply heading for landfill, while we top up our nutritional deficits with expensive supplements from the health store.

Fruit and vegetable peelings, we now know, are often the nutritionally richest part of the plant: potato skins, for instance, contain much more iron, zinc, calcium, B3 and B6, antioxidants and invaluable fibre than their plain starchy contents, while the stalks of watercress, spinach, parsley and coriander have all the goodness of the leaves.

So I have revived my stockpot. It no longer sits for days on the back of the cooker. Instead, once or twice a week, I inspect the contents of my fridge and weed out the potential stock material. Then it all goes into a big pan of water and simmers for an hour or so. Once cool, I freeze it.

What goes into my C21 stockpot? The stringy, stalky bits of watercress that aren't comely enough for a salad; potato peelings, maybe; the half-bag of supermarket salad I never got around to eating; the tough outer stalks of that head of celery, as well as its leaves (the tender inner stalks made nice nibbles); a bowlful of white, papery garlic skins and glossy orange onion skins; that lone, small chicory; the half-pack of parsley rapidly losing its green appeal; the dark green tops of leeks; and the packet of spinach I had forgotten about.

Everything gets a thorough rinse before it goes into the pan. I usually also add a whole big onion, a carrot, a clove or two of garlic, and some fresh herbs.

So the next time I plan a soup or a casserole, I no longer reach for the stock cube – I simply defrost some of that tasty, amazingly nutritious stuff waiting in the freezer.

Interested in finding out more about how you can live better? Take a look at this month's Live Better challenge here.

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